Flocked off: FAA swaps floppy disks for digital dashboards at 435 sites

The Federal Aviation Administration is finally putting its floppy disks out to pasture. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday that the agency is deploying the Enterprise – Information Display System (E-IDS), a digital dashboard that replaces four legacy setups across more than 400 air traffic control facilities. The system pulls real-time weather alerts, equipment outages, restricted airspace changes and pilot reports into one screen, killing off the manual workflows and magnetic media that kept them in circulation.

The switch is already underway at five sites: control hubs in Atlantic City, Nashville, Rochester, Atlanta and Salt Lake City. The FAA is aiming to cover 435 facilities by the end of 2028. Duffy kept the victory lap short and smug: “Good news America: floppy disks are out, 21st century tech is in,” he said in a release.

Duffy, a former reality TV star and Fox Business host, has made the 3.5-inch disk his favorite prop, waving it around in speeches and TV hits as shorthand for government rot. He's not wrong that the hardware is ancient. A Government Accountability Office report from September 2024 found 90 percent of the country's critical air traffic control infrastructure was due or past due for a technology refresh, and nearly half of the 138 systems surveyed were flagged as unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, thanks to funding gaps, thin maintenance expertise and missing spare parts.

E-IDS isn't a fresh brainstorm, though. It's a long-running FAA contract awarded to Leidos, the Reston, Virginia-based defense contractor, back in August 2020 during the first Trump administration. The years since were spent grinding through procurement, safety validation, testing and vendor schedules. Which is a reminder that swapping screens for paper is the easy part.

The harder part is people. The FAA has been hammered in recent years over ground stops, runway close calls (one involved President Donald Trump), chronic controller burnout and high-profile software failures like the 2023 NOTAM outage. Under Duffy, the Transportation Department has pitched gamers as a recruiting pool for the job, and the administration has leaned on tech-world allies including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to help untangle the mess, even when that risks making it messier.

Money is still the sticking point. Duffy has been pressing Congress for an extra $30 billion on top of the $12.5 billion “down payment” he secured in 2025 for his air traffic control modernization plan. Floppy disks are out, but thousands of missing certified controllers won't be replaced by a dashboard.